Ad Hominem
by Deathly Noted
Summary: Light finds himself in a realm that is neither Heaven nor Hell; after all, L is there with him. LightxL.
1. Comedy and Tragedy

**ad ho·mi·nem**  
–adjective

1. appealing to one's prejudices, emotions, or special interests rather than to one's intellect or reason.

2. attacking an opponent's character rather than answering his argument.

* * *

An agonized scream wrenched itself from Light's lips and hovered above him, detached from and yet a part of him, like a Shinigami... but Ryuk was gone now. He had deserted Light and left him in the hands of Death. Recalling the twisted smile on the Shinigami's face as he hopelessly begged for more time, Light felt a sickening spasm in his chest and wondered if his heart attack had truly ended.

With another cry, Light shifted onto his side and retched blood onto white tiles so dusty they portrayed soft shades of gray. Everything was pain and blood and open wounds, and Light didn't understand why he was here when he had been told he could neither go to Heaven nor Hell, when he had come to understand that death was equal in its erasure. Had that damned Shinigami lied to him about the nature of the afterlife? He wouldn't be surprised, after Ryuk so callously betrayed him.

Damn it.

Damn it.

_Damn it._

Light couldn't suppress the screams from leaving his throat in an endless, bloody, gurgled stream. His chest was seizing up again and again, his breath coming in ragged gasps, and the thought of suffering an eternity for his "sins" made him furious... frightened...

"Oh, it's you." Light froze and fell silent as the voice echoed around him. That monotonous voice cut into him more deeply than his wounds, chilled him more infinitely than this room of snow and slush tones. "I was wondering who could be crying so pitifully."

That familiar, cold, calculating voice. "...L?"

Light's eyes rose slowly from the floor and found, to his bewilderment, an image he thought would remain forever trapped in his nightmares: the bare twitching toes, the worn-out jeans, living and breathing and looking with eyes that see — oh God, no, no, no, it couldn't be —

"Am I in Hell?" he blurted out.

"Of course not," L replied with the faintest hint of amusement; but even as the glimmer surfaced in his pupils, it was suppressed and replaced by an apparent distaste. "I am righteous. Why would I be in Hell?" With that, L turned away, vanishing as quickly as he had appeared.

"Where are you going?" Light called after him, surprising himself with his own desperation.

"I'll be back," the voice whispered to the darkness. Footsteps faded steadily to silence. Light slumped over, collapsed into himself, an admission of his own lifelessness.

And then he waited, at such length and in such great pain, that he began to suspect L had only been a hallucination, a memory… wishful thinking, it dawned on him, when his injured wrist was poured over with pain. His eyes snapped open and his jaw dropped in preparation to turn his reflexive groan into a verbal assault, but he froze when he realized exactly what that acidic feeling was: antiseptic. The mini-bottle was pinched between L's forefinger and thumb, spilling out amber liquid like gold when it caught the light and murky water when it didn't.

L was treating his wounds — or at least attempting to. He didn't seem to know what to do after the antiseptic ran out, simply staring down at the array of white gauze pads and bandages atop his knees with an expression that was almost harmless in its hesitance yet hard around the edges. Somewhere between inaction and resolution, nonexistence and humanness, former and current, lies and truths; between black and white, they lingered, unable to make the next move, for there were no gray squares to be found on a chessboard.

"What are you doing?" It was his fourth question, a slurred and useless thought that seeped out with his blood.

The only answer he received was in the motion of being lifted up almost tenderly by his uninjured shoulder as L inspected the bullet wound in the other, and then L smirked down at him, said, "You might want to close your eyes now."

"Wha—_ahhhhh!_" Light was screaming. Somehow, he was screaming, even when he fell silent again and stared up at L wide-eyed, lips parted to pant out his pain and his shock, because he recognized this situation for what it was.

"Tell me who shot you." It felt like L's entire hand was inside his shoulder, groping at bone and tendon and pushing the bullet in further.

"Get out. _Get out of my head…_"

"I am quite real, I assure you, and I can make this situation that much worse for you if I don't get an answer in five, four, three, two—"

"I was caught in the crossfire during a drug bust. I was…"

"Do not lie to me," L droned, maneuvering veins beneath the skin like wires on a switchboard. The feeling was nauseating.

"Matsuda. Matsuda shot me," he admitted, only to have his senses assaulted with the most excruciating pain he had ever experienced. His skin was being torn from the inside out.

"Was it Mello? …Matt?"

"Who—?" Light gasped. "I told you, it was Matsuda. _Matsuda_."

L's grip loosened, though his eyes were still suspicious. "Why would Matsuda shoot you?"

"Because I'm Kira. I am. L, did you know?"

The bullet was removed so harshly that it was likely more of a hindrance than anything, and after all that, L had the audacity to disinfect, stitch, and bandage his wounds, his gaze somewhat glazed, as if what had just occurred between them was utterly boring and predictable. Maybe L had tortured before.

"…You're sick…" he murmured, half to himself. L averted his eyes then, and if Light didn't know this man better, he would have seen it as a gesture of guilt or submissiveness, but implicitly L was calling him the lowliest of the low — _rotten_. Against his will, Light flinched.

"Indeed, I am sick of playing games. I have no reason to lie to you any longer, 'first ever friend', and so let me be the first to admit that I despise you. I am sure that, at least in this respect, our feelings are mutual." Abyssal eyes lifted, as if seeking confirmation, only to bypass Light entirely and stare at the cobwebs hanging like nooses from the ceiling. "Regardless… if you are interested… seek me out."

L walked away, and Light let him, without asking for clarification or screaming curses or giving any form of recognition; glaciated by revelation. Before, he had been willing to blame Ryuk and Near and Mello and Mikami and Matsuda and even himself for his downfall… but now… now, he knew. It was L who had defeated him, even from the grave.

Burying his face in the crook of his arm and curling his knees unconsciously to his chest, Light wept.

* * *

**"I never thought of picking up the Death Note as a misfortune."**

* * *

A long time passed before Light had the physical strength to move and even longer before he had the motivation to leave his cocoon. It was only when the whiteness of the room began to remind him of a padded cell that he unfurled from the post he had taken up in the corner and stood with a sudden sense of dignity, as if his time hadn't dissolved in fits of furious tears. He made no move to retrieve the suit jacket he had been using as a pillow when it fell to the floor, nor the striped necktie that lay coiled like a shed snake skin, for all that physically and emotionally restrained him was itself to be locked away in his prison of many days.

Mindfucking how, when he left that room he had come to associate with a psychiatric ward, he actually found himself wandering through a dilapidated hospital. Its corridors and rooms were unnumbered, the only indication that he was actually moving onward and downward in that repetitive whitewash coming in the form of debris on the floor. Old needles, smashed vials and pill bottles, canisters of anesthesia with split sides, even stains of blood on the floor acted as landmarks — and then there were the broken-down people. Every so often, Light would cross paths with a shell of a human in the hallway or catch glimpses as he passed doorways of fetal adults staring back at him like stillborn children in their sagging sick bed coffins. They barely acknowledged his existence, never called out to him, and he found he didn't want them to, because he knew exactly what they were.

When he finally reached the lobby and stepped through frozen-open electronic doors into the outside world, his maladjusted eyes were half-blinded by the bloodlust shade of what felt like sunset, and his remaining tunnel vision could only focus on L in the distance. Even against the burning backlight that transformed L into a shadow puppet, he could perceive the crouched position that distinguished him, the languid forefinger and thumb dropping pebbles into a pool of gleaming silver. He could almost hear the sound, almost, almost, now, but though he walked and walked across the field of wild grass, he drew no closer to his destination.

The scenery was looping, somehow. He tried to outwit the system by walking in a zigzag, walking forward and then doubling back and walking forward again, even walking in a completely irrelevant direction and around in circles and hopping, but no matter what he did, he couldn't reach the place L had.

Light was losing to him _again_.

No sooner had this occurred to him than his fingernails were raking across his scalp in an attempt to snag onto the thought and drag it out of his mental process by force, and he spoke to himself in low dangerous hisses that were curses as much as reassurances.

The sound must have carried across the grassland, because L stood up then, cocking his head slightly, as if inviting Light to sit with him. No smirk could be seen for the shadows, but that only made the derisiveness and dangerousness of the gesture doubly evident. The dark pressure that was L threatened Light's very existence.

"Fuck you! I never want to see you again!" Light exploded, and his U-turn sent him crashing into L, his face burying itself directly in unruly raven tresses. "W-what the—!" he spluttered through a mouthful of hair he had inhaled in his surprise, and reacting on instinctual feelings of alarm and suffocation and disgust, he aimed an uppercut at the static line on L's lips that spoke of neither self-satisfaction nor surprise.

The blow barely landed — the briefest graze of knuckles across L's cheek, more of a caress than anything — as the backward momentum of L's palms against his chest began to overwhelm his own forward momentum, and he found himself on the ground, being looked down upon again. That was going to change.

"You used the Death Note," he accused.

"Correct."

No shame, no hesitation; a simple, undecorated statement, which Light should have expected from L, but still it took him aback. He jolted upright, his own eyes probably wider than L's, whose gaze had become darker and droopier in death, as if the hood of execution had yet to be fully removed.

"Then this world — there's no question — it holds only humans who've written in a Shinigami notebook."

"Correct."

"And you… you want to be _partners_."

L said nothing, only shuffled to Light's side and lowered himself down to Light's level, folding his arms across his knees and staring out at the silver sea levelly. There was no lack of clarity in L's body language, a sense of finality in the silence that was settling, but even so, a caged bird of a word chose this moment to escape Light's lips: "_Why?_"

Blended black irises and pupils landed on Light like dice rolling snake eyes, teeth flashed like fangs as lips parted, though the lethal dose of vindication for which Light braced himself never came. The next moment L's mouth had disappeared behind his arms and his eyes were focused on the water again.

"Because Light Yagami is brilliant, innovative, zealous, cunning," L enumerated without an ounce of venom. "Because this is not the time for your or my stubbornness. Six years, and I have yet to discover the secret to escaping this place. Do not be conceited enough to believe that you will have more luck on your own. We must combine our intellect and skill sets to achieve success: that is the conclusion I reached many years ago… many, many years ago, and I… am tired, Light. I just want to see my family again. You can understand that, can't you?"

The silence stretched so long and thin between them that it was becoming difficult for Light to breathe. Opening his mouth in an attempt to speak, his choked vocal chords crackled and croaked pathetically, and worst of all was the complete lack of acknowledgement he received when L murmured, "No, I suppose not. You've never cared about anyone but yourself."

Light said nothing, only brought one leg upward and paused with his hand on his knee, reveling in L's uneasiness perhaps longer than he should have before offering reassurance that he wasn't leaving with an outstretched hand. His peace offering was regarded with open suspicion, if not entirely rejected by the way L's body stiffened, yet the moment he began to pull back, L's hand darted out and firmly clasped his own. From there, all it took was one jerk of the wrist to upset the balance of L's precarious perch and send him tumbling face-first onto the ground.

Light said nothing, but he did laugh himself senseless.

* * *

**A/N:** "Past experience: He who never makes mistakes, never did anything that's worthy." – My lucky fortune cookie. Good luck, Light, on your path back from sociopath land! Moreover, may my Death Note fanfiction debut be a success! I'll post the next chapter of Ad Hominem soon and my other Death Note fanfiction too, so alert me if you're interested. Thank you for reading. 


	2. Internal Affairs

**ad ho·mi·nem**  
–adjective

1. appealing to one's prejudices, emotions, or special interests rather than to one's intellect or reason.

2. attacking an opponent's character rather than answering his argument.

* * *

The sky was the deepest black that Light had ever seen. Even the crescent moon was dull and thin, like the closed eye of a greater being unwilling to look upon the wretched world below him, let alone grant it illumination. 

Regardless, the water shone, seeming to glow from beneath the surface rather than reflect the moonlight. The luminance seeped out as pearly fog and clung to the whites of L's eyes and shirt, to the pallor of his skin, making the man appear cadaverous even though his eyes were becoming more animated as their debate dragged on into the night.

"You have no sense for metaphor. A hospital is a place of healing, right?" Light waited for L to nod minutely before continuing, knowing that what he said next would be poorly received at the very least, yet he was firm in his beliefs. "This world is deteriorating. I think we're supposed to fix it."

"Ah, I see. This ocean must represent the need to reflect on one's sins and repent; this sand, the time we have to do so; and as for this oddly shaped rock, I have not yet discerned its deeper meaning, but I am certain it is a key element in this theory. Perhaps Light can 'enlighten' me." L's lips had barely closed around the last vowel of his statement but already the last grains of a fistful of said sand were slipping through Light's fingers, over L's head and down his face and nape and shirt. L made no move to counterattack; he didn't even attempt to shake off the sand. Apparently, 'once is once' was as dead as the detective, his response only a sulky, "Why would you do such a thing? I was merely elaborating on your theory…"

"No, you were mocking me," Light retorted, brushing sand off his hands with the air of a surgeon removing bloodied gloves after surgery. "And I think that's quite enough of your childishness. You're obviously refuting all of my theories just for the sake of it. Why else would this world have a hospital as its center point? My theory is the only possibility, really. I'm right and you're wrong, it's as simple as that. You know, you—" Light stopped dead at the brink of more colorful abuse, because L had become engaged in the most grating of his many irksome behaviors: smirk-smiling. Suspicion was only the tonal and facial coating for his more deep sense of foreboding when he probed, "What?"

"This world isn't based on a hospital, though it is amusing that you think so. Our town is just beyond that hill," L gestured to their right, and now that it was pointed out, Light was surprised he hadn't noticed that the sky was the slightest bit brighter in that direction. "The hospital building acts as a containment facility of sorts for hopeless cases… those who are banished or who do not wish to coexist in a civilization. That is all."

"And you decided to banish Kira himself from your Death Note civilization? That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. I should be your _leader_. I—"

"Ah. Do not misunderstand me." Plucking up a blade of grass, L began to chew on it, muffling his words somewhat as he continued, "You were born in the hospital, not banished to it. It is as you said, I presume… the hospital building has meaning to you because you want to fix things. As for me…"

"…As for you?" Light prompted when it seemed L wouldn't continue. The blade of half-chewed grass had slipped from parted lips unnoticed, leaving a drip of saliva-dew.

"I was born in the theatre." When L's eyes turned from the water, the reflective ripples and blur cleared and his pupils were darker and harder than ever. "Ironic, isn't it, that neither Kira nor L were born into this world's courthouse."

Light chose not to respond to that comment, falling back on old habits of squabbling to avoid difficult matters. "Why didn't you tell me about this 'town' sooner? Every theory I've put forth has been founded on misinformation."

"I thought perhaps you could offer a new perspective without knowing… but truthfully, I didn't expect you to come up with any idea I hadn't. There is only so much scope to theories physical and metaphysical, and I have spent years contemplating both."

"You forgot the cynical: that there really is no way out," Light deadpanned. The frown L gave him was musical, tying two flat notes together. "Luckily, I'm an optimist, or I would have walked out on this partnership hours ago. You're the most insufferable person I've ever known. Truthfully, L, I wish I could kill you all over again."

"…That is nice to know," L answered, equally apathetic. "Optimism will be necessary because I believe our task is virtually impossible. Our solution likely lies in the documents in the library, but I have not been able to do much more than find patterns in the writing. It is a language I do not recognize, modern or ancient. It may be the Shinigami—"

"If it's in the Shinigami language, I can read it." The cocky declaration was with mute skepticism received. "Really. I made Ryuk teach me."

"Ryuk was your Shinigami?" L interrogated.

Light, belatedly realizing his mistake, tried to correct it with a conversational tone. "Yeah. He'd do anything for an apple."

There was a contemplative expression on L's face, but no deeper questions came, and for that Light was grateful. He wanted to disassociate from those days, from his failings, and have a new beginning in this place… but if fragments of his past were waiting for him beyond that hill, could anything really change? Would he be the phoenix rising up from the ashes only to burst into flames again?

Silently still, L arose and wandered in the direction of that vague light in the distance, movement that was slowness, forwardness that was disinclination, a light that consisted of darkness. Maybe it wasn't an invitation, but Light followed.

Molten-cold silver swallowed him whole. It was a liquid that tasted like frost-paned windows and burnt tastebuds all in one, a metamorphosis of shadows that glowed, and he could touch the surface of the shifting sea, but it was solid somehow — oh God, he was going to drown —

L's fingers pincered his shirt cuff and led his hand to the sandbank, and though that was as far as the help extended, Light found that he could pull the rest of his body out without much difficulty. Laid out on his back, gasping for breath, he didn't feel grateful at all — he was fuming. He should have been ruling a New World by now, not struggling to survive in one.

"You are incompetent." L spoke it as a fact, not an attack, which made Light broil all the more.

"Just a few hours ago, it was 'Light Yagami is brilliant'. Insult or praise, I don't trust a damned thing you say." Grimacing more than scowling with the realization that his clothes were drying at an alarming speed, certainly not pleased, Light jerked upright and heard as much as felt the odd crackle and pop of opalescent chalk coming off fabric and skin. It became dust and who knows what, vanishing almost instantly into the sand and air like evidence being whisked away from a crime scene.

This place, more than anything, was his enemy.

Though Light was focusing the full force of his glare on that ocean of unearthly substance, he sensed when L was about to speak and cut him off with a brusque, "Don't waste your breath. I'm thinking."

"That's boring. I want to go now," L prodded.

"Then leave," Light parried carelessly. "I'll come when I'm ready."

"What if you take an eternity?"

That droning voice was impossible for Light to block out, somehow. Even the barely there sound of L's feet shuffling and shifting in the sand, impatiently, _hurry_, picked at him like a hyena for carrion meat. He kneaded his forehead in an attempt to stir his thoughts, but a viable solution refused to present itself, and what was once a soft swirling motion became an agitated beat, and one _shut up_, and two _go away_, and three…

"Let's make a deal."

"No," Light's vocal chords acted of their own accord, though his fingers stilled, sheltering half of his face with a somatic opera mask.

"I will teach you how to move around freely if you will teach me to read Shinigami," L proposed, heedless of the uncivil refusal he had received; but Light was equally stubborn.

"No," he repeated.

"Yes," L countered, and then Light was half on his hands and knees, half on his feet, being dragged through sand that tripped him again and again, trying desperately to regain his balance enough to get a punch or kick in—

He didn't even have a chance to speak before he was shoved in some random dark direction… and suffusing him was _light_, as if he had suddenly opened his eyes or flicked some switch in his mind. Though it was dim in substance, the night it contradicted had been so utterly starless and black, many disorienting moments of squinting and swiveling passed before he realized that L wasn't with him and this definitely wasn't a library.

"…Fuck," Light muttered, righting himself without leaning on the chair beside him, almost afraid it would crumble to dust if touched. Everything in this room looked strangely out of place, delicate, as if the ruddy candlelight swimming on the surfaces of the dinnerware would leave stains. It was too perfect, like the scene for a movie or a picture from a hotel brochure, the exact opposite of and yet essentially the same as the decrepit hospital building, and Light held no delusions that he was back in the living world, not even for a moment.

Still, it startled him when the shadows themselves seemed to seize him, twisting his arm behind his back and smothering any sound of shock he could have made against the tablecloth. The percussion of his forehead on the tabletop, the dying whine of broken glass, spoke in his stead. Only after the fact did he groan in disorientation and distress, sensing hot candle wax dribbling onto his flesh and blood in his eyes and the sharpness of a knife threatening his throat. Most of all, though, he tasted the betrayal, a thousand needles of expectation like rusty nails and insect claws in his mouth.

"Light Yagami… finally…" A familiar voice behind him, dark and deep, but his attacker wasn't L after all — not directly, at least. The crimson curtain had parted as he blinked rapidly, enough to reveal L standing just across the table, simply staring at him.

"Aren't you going to help me?" Light spoke softly, lest he slit his own throat with an overactive Adam's apple, yet there was still some sibilance slithering along the surface of his words, accusing L as much as coaxing him to take a bite, _take a bite now, because I have the Knowledge_. The blade nicked his skin and sent a peel of blood shivering downward, but it was only a superficial wound, and wasn't he immortal now, a true god? "I thought we were in this together."

When the only thing L bit into was the flesh of his thumb, openly suppressing a smirk, it was Light who felt naked with realization, not shamed but infuriated. His snarl was a declaration of renewed war, Kira versus L, God versus the Devil himself, and fallen angels would fall again.

"_Let him go."_

Someday, sometime, L's words registered in his mind, and what finally faltered and fell apart was the fated cycle. L had his eyes focused on something beyond Light, bleak and boreal, but…

"No." There was mania in that voice, murder.

Involuntarily, Light swallowed.

"I will tell you everything I know about Naomi Misora if you promise to leave him alone from now on."

"Na…Naomi?" It was less than speech, the groping sound of a baby trying to form words. "You know her, Ryuzaki?"

"Indeed. Do we have an agreement?"

Light was freed directly, though he scrambled across the room so quickly that it caused a spasmodic visual blackout, accentuating his own heartbeat, his shattered breaths which only seemed to cast the oxygen further from his chest; and L's decree, rising above all, "Light, you may wait outside."

Without missing a beat, he began to argue his case, "Why should I? I want to—" only to be grabbed yet again and tossed aside like disposable waste. Stumbling dizzily through the dark, unsure if it was mental or physical, he latched onto the first thing his outstretched hands came across, a pole of some sorts, and leaning up against it to stabilize himself, he reversed direction and shouted, "When I get my hands on you, L—!"

There was no response.

Light licked his lips and distinguished blood, dripping down from his head wound or perhaps it was from biting himself… but hadn't it been L who bit…? Why was everything spinning like this? He shook his head, as if he could knock out a remnant of that metallic almost-liquid lodged inside his eardrums, some grime still swirling around with his cerebrospinal fluid, and when he settled again his squinted eyes glimpsed a _perfect blue_ sky.

Perfect, until his eyes opened wide enough to discern the clouds that had always been there, blurred into the background. They were neither cumulus nor cirrus, nor were they even monochromatic in shade; they were multidimensional see-through, like soap bubbles that had drifted too high, and even if Light had so desired, it would have been impossible to translate those shapes to the names of earthly objects.

Without a sound, without even a scowl, he slid down the pole to sit on the ground. His expression was a blank slate as he stared out at that grid of divides, where blue sky met green eternity, where overgrown grass suddenly became flat, where white lines marked the boundaries between in and out, because hadn't it always been as simple as choosing sides — as difficult? This wasn't a game anymore, but this wasn't a war either. This was something much more complicated, much more wretched, than ever before: internal affairs.

Light closed his eyes to the colors and questions and waited patiently. Here, on the tennis courts, it was inevitable that L would find him again.

* * *

**A/N:** I torture Light because I love him. Really. I hope you're willing to continue, because there's still a lot of plot to get through, and rejoice! for the next chapter will be more straightforward... probably. Your support has been the most amazing thing. Thank you so much, each and every one of you!

Additional info…

"The internal affairs division of a law enforcement agency investigates incidents and plausible suspicions of lawbreaking and professional misconduct attributed to officers on the force." – Wikipedia. XD;

"It became dust and who knows what" — This line was adapted from something Rem said in the manga: "At that moment, Gelus became sand and rust and who knows what… …and died."

"a _perfect blue _sky" — I had the film by Satoshi Kon in mind when I wrote this line. I won't give anything away, but I will say that both Perfect Blue and Ad Hominem play with the concept of reality/fantasy. If you've already seen Perfect Blue, hopefully you understand why I associated it with Light and L's relationship and their characters.


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